A Wall Street Truthteller?

The NYT on Sandy Lewis:

Mr. Lewis wants to flip over Wall Street’s paving stones and search for worms. He relies on his singular strength: he discerns patterns where most see random data. He forecast the financial meltdown of 2008 that vaporized Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers. In 2006, he warned a Bear Stearns executive: “Bear is toast. Get out now!”

Lehman Brothers, he notes, certified it was in good health in June 2008 and issued stock, attracting investment, including from the New Jersey Teachers’ Pension and Annuity Fund. Secretly, Lehman was on an intravenous drip, poisoned by bad debt.

“My respect for their brains is too great to think Lehman’s top guys didn’t know they were conveying the cynical impression of health,” Mr. Lewis said.

He is no less suspicious of Goldman Sachs, which has alumni sprinkled across the upper reaches of government. In a tough spot, Goldman obtained extraordinary permission to make an overnight metamorphosis from investment bank to traditional bank holding company.

“Can I prove this was a wired deal? Absolutely not,” Mr. Lewis said. “Am I certain of it? Only 100 percent.”

As for the whirling, three-million-shares-per-second casino of Wall Street? He sees it as rigged. “I would not risk stocks under any circumstances,” he said, “because we don’t know when this thing is going to blow.”

The guy is definitely fascinating.  The story about how he got prosecuted by Rudy Giuliani is amazing.  I would agree with him that there's still another shoe to drop in the economy.

UW-Whitewater Loses

D3Football:

Mary Hardin-Baylor and Linfield each won Top 10 battles on Saturday, but it was a surprising loss that steals the headlines.
Buffalo State drove the length of the field and Casey Kacz found Ryan Carney in the front corner of the end zone for a 10-yard touchdown with 3.2 seconds left as the Bengals snapped No. 1 UW-Whitewater's 46-game winning streak, defeating the Warhawks 7-6.
Kacz drove the offense 75 yards for a touchdown after the Bengals got the ball back with 1:35 left. The key play was a hook-and-double-lateral that converted a fourth down and long.
"That's a play we practice every week," said coach Jerry Boyes, "because it's our last play-type of a play. The kids executed it to perfection."
Whitewater was limited to a pair of Eric Kindler field goals, the last with 1:35 left to give the Warhawks a 6-0 lead. Each team missed two field goals.

That is a pretty big upset. A 46 game winning streak is pretty damn impressive, though. I guess that means Mount Union will return to a familiar place, the number 1 ranking.

Well Said

Rick Santorum at the Value Voters Summit:

Former presidential candidate Rick Santorum attacked the media and "smart people" for not being on the side of conservatives in a speech to the Values Voter Summit on Saturday.
"We will never have the media on our side, ever, in this country," Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator, told the audience at the Omni Shoreham hotel. "We will never have the elite, smart people on our side."
The media "doesn't like the other side," Santorum said. "And not necessarily, I would argue, because they agree with them, but because they can influence the country.
"If just a few people make decisions about what this world looks like, what this country looks like, then you have people sitting in offices at major media outlets and Hollywood who think they can deal with a small group of people, to get them to jump through the hoops they want you to," Santorum said.

Yeah, Rick, smart people aren't going to be on your side.  Seriously, when did being intelligent become a bad thing?  I could understand somebody saying that somebody in book smart, but lacks common sense, but Republicans have completely undermined any possibly claim they have to utilizing common sense.  When your solution to the global economic meltdown is cutting taxes and getting rid of regulations, you've veered far away from common sense.  I understand that Republican voters enjoy being told that they are better people than the rest of the country, but why do they like being told they aren't smart?

Why Is Romney Slipping In The Polls?

John Cole gives a hypothesisfor  why Romney has dropped in the polls:

BTW- notice that it never occurs to Caddell that the reason Romney is failing is because his ideas are awful, the Republicans are insane and dangerous and represent about, well, 27% of America, and he is out of touch with America. No, no, no… It’s just bad messaging. That’s like saying rectal cancer is unpopular only because it has a shitty logo and the jingle sucks.

I really do think that some fence sitters tuned into the Republican National Convention, listened to those nuts talk about a Barack Obama who doesn't exist, wondered how the GOP thought  slashing federal spending and handing out even more tax cuts would balance the budget and promote economic growth, and they decided they didn't want to board that crazy train.  Then tuning into Bill Clinton explaining in plain English that Republicans are idiots sealed the deal.  The polls will probably get closer down the stretch, but widespread exposure to Republican "ideas" put them pretty well behind.

Melting Arctic Ice May Bring Severe Winter

Well this is a kick in the ass:

Francis published a study last year in which she showed that Arctic warming might already be causing the jet stream to become more amplified in a north-south direction. In other words, the fall and winter jet stream may be getting wavier. A more topsy-turvy jet stream can yield more extreme weather events, Francis said, because weather and climate extremes are often associated with large undulations in the jet stream that can take a long time to dissipate.
“We know that certain types of extreme weather events are related to weather that takes a long time to change,” Francis said.
While there are indications that the jet stream is slowing and may be more prone to making huge dips, or “troughs,” scientists have a limited ability to pinpoint how this will play out in the coming winter season.

“The locations of those waves really depends on other factors,” Francis said, such as El Niño and a natural climate pattern known as the Arctic Oscillation. “I can only say that it’s probably going to be a very interesting winter,” she said.
Francis’ work has linked Arctic warming to the unusually cold and snowy winters of 2009-10 and 2010-11, during which the U.S. East Coast and parts of Europe were pummeled by fierce winter storms and experienced cooler-than-average conditions. The winter of 2011-12 was much milder, by comparison, but Francis said it, too, was consistent with her research. Not all meteorologists agree on the Arctic connection theory, but that may change with time.

I can just imagine more ice storms and ridiculous winds knocking out power for days or weeks.  I don't have any idea what kind of weather might result from climate change, but it seems the consensus is that it will be more extreme.

Fall Cattle Drive

Via The Dish:

Herdsmen and -women wearing traditional Bavarian clothes (Dirndl and Lederhosen) accompany cattle down from alpine mountains in the annual cattle drive descent on September 13, 2012 near Oberstdorf, Germany. The herdsmen bring the cattle up to mountain meadows in the spring and stay there throughout the summer, where the animals graze on grass and the herdsmen live in a small huts called an alms, often without electricity, where many make cheese from the cows' milk. The tradition dates back through centuries, and in countries like Germany, Switzerland and Austria, the culture has a deep resonance in folk history. In September the season ends and the herdsmen return the cattle to farmers in a festive ceremony marked by the decoration of the lead cow with a garland, but only if all the cattle survived the summer. By Johannes Simon/Getty Images.

Unfortunately, I wouldn't be able to decorate the lead cow with a garland, because last Friday my cows got out and one got hit by a car and had to be put down.  That made for an unpleasant weekend.

A Couple Quick Things

While the Libya deaths are tragic, and the people who committed the violence (and the people behind the video) are idiots, are these four deaths any worse than the six deaths at the Sikh temple outside Milwaukee?  Both involved hate-filled idiot killers and innocent victims.  Is there a difference in who did the killing and who did the dying?

On another subject, did Mitt Romney actually blame Obama for the 30 year long trend of income inequality, and say that Obama's policies make it worse?  I guess my take is that Romney personifies the causes of income inequality and the erosion of the middle class.

An Overlooked Invention

William Rosen, via Ritholtz:

The sliding D-valve dramatically improved the steam-engine, and ushered in the age of incremental innovation. Source: Library of Congress

Lists of history’s great inventions always include the wheel, fire, the telephone, digital computing, the printing press, television, the automobile and (surprisingly frequently) the flush toilet. Depending on the archness of the list maker, you’ll also find the likes of the transistor radio, birth- control pills, eyeglasses, the Internet, WD-40, the push-up bra and the iPhone, which came in at No. 9 in a 2010 survey.
You won’t find the D-valve on any of them. However, almost every list is likely to include the steam engine, for which the sliding D-valve was invented by Murray in 1797. That’s because the steam engine is one of the most transformative machines in history -- the power behind the Industrial Revolution.
Yet the steam engine changed the world in a different way than we usually believe. For one thing, it didn’t actually drive the machines of the Industrial Revolution, at least not at first. Though Thomas Newcomen’s first engine appeared in 1712, it wasn’t until the middle of the 19th century that steam power overtook waterwheels as Britain’s foremost power source. This is why Murray’s 10-inch-long valve does a better job of illustrating the steam engine’s historical importance than Newcomen’s 40-foot behemoth.

The whole thing is worth reading, both for the history and the perspective.  A quick summary is that incremental changes add up to significant improvements over time.

Why I Love Joe Biden

The Inquisitr:

Joe Biden invited a firefighter to come to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave to try one of the White House’s now famous home-brewed beers. And just to make sure that there was no confusion with the invitation, Biden insured the crew in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, that he wasn’t bullsh*ting.
Pointing to one of his aids, Biden said:

“He’s going to call you, no bullshit.”

When Biden remembered that the room was full of reporters, he changed the message slightly. Biden said:

“This is no malarkey. You come to the White House. I’ll buy you a beer.”

According to the Huffington Post, Biden is a few years overdue on his beer promise to Deputy Chief Brad Shober. Biden visited the Shanksville Volunteer Fire Department last year and gave Shober a presidential coin. Biden told Shober at the time that if he still had the coin the next time he visits he’d buy the crew a round of beers.
Shober told the NY Times earlier this week that he ”made sure that was [in] my pocket” when the vice president came to visit on 9/11.
When Biden left the volunteer firefighter department in Pennsylvania, he made sure that Shober would come visit the White House. Biden did, however, say that he couldn’t promise a visit from President Obama.

That guy is just hilarious.  You don't know what he is going to say or do.  Pairing him with such a buttoned down guy like Obama makes it even better.  Even though Biden doesn't drink, it is easy for me to imagine he does (or imagine Obama drinks too much).

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